Empowering management teams with the CX insight needed.

Leading tech correspondent to outline some of the key trends set to reshape customer behaviour over the next five years

As individuals we’re all comfortable with using many different global cloud services every day via our smartphones, so it’s surprising how often the Sabio Solutions team still gets asked the following question: can someone please just explain the cloud to me?

The “voice of the customer” takes on a very literal meaning when you’re dealing with contact centre security.

Why it’s time to start transitioning from ‘what happened?’ to ‘what should I do?’...

The Issue: At Sabio we’re seeing an acceleration towards feedback fatigue among increasingly over-surveyed customers.

Recent Ofcom research suggests that time spent on landlines has halved in the UK since 2012, and that over the same period we’ve only increased our mobile call minutes by 12-13% on average. Ofcom asked the question – do phone numbers actually matter anymore?

The Issue: Recently Mark Zuckerberg set out his ‘privacy-focused’ vision for Facebook. He suggested secure messaging will be one of the dominant ways that we all communicate going forward, and also outlined plans to integrate Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.

Last week Forrester Research’s lead contact centre analyst found herself on hold for 30 minutes waiting for a Bank of America agent to help. She turned to Twitter to highlight the bank’s horrible IVR app, lack of a callback facility, absence of a queue time indicator and the same continuous hold message.

In its Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2019, analyst firm Gartner rightly highlights how conversational platforms are reshaping the way that customers interact with brands.

For a number of years now at Sabio we’ve been advising brands about the challenge that social networks such as Google and Facebook pose to the CX community.

It was great to attend the UK National Contact Centre Conference run by the CCMA at the British Library in London last week, and to present alongside speakers from leading brands such as Air France, Booking.com, Lego and Severn Trent Water.

For years it’s been accepted that a bad IVR interaction can damage the overall customer experience. So why are some organisations now in danger of repeating the same mistakes when it comes to deploying the latest AI-powered chatbot solutions?

Earlier this month I read about how Ofcom, the UK telecoms regulator, has received a government grant to examine how blockchain technology could be applied to improve the way that our phone numbers are managed. And, unlike most of the blockchain stories I see, it actually came across as a potentially useful application.

Stanley Milgram conducted a famous experiment in 1963, the year before I was born. No, he wasn’t a Frankenstein de nos jours, and I wasn’t his creation, whatever you’ve heard from my school chums.

I’m always keen to see how organisations actually deliver when it comes to customer contact innovation, particularly in terms of joining up their service offer across multiple channels.

Stuck in a hotel recently watching Netflix, it struck me as significant how the company is now actively using the WhatsApp Business platform to communicate and encourage account contact with its subscribers.

Everyone talks about providing great customer experiences, but how can you make that happen? Lack of communication on a recent flight I took brought home to me the need to make the customer feedback process as easy as possible - and also highlighted the valuable role that the latest micro survey approaches can play in making feedback as immediate and relevant as possible.

Customer Experience is now the key battleground in today’s hyper-competitive brand landscape. With the pandemic triggering an unprecedented pivot towards digital service delivery, we’ve seen a decade of innovation delivered in the last two years across core CX areas such as AI and automation, cloud delivery, and the application of digital transformation across all aspects of customer experience delivery.

Sabio Group, the leading European Digital CX Transformation Provider, has today announced the appointment of Nils Steinmeyer as its new Chief Financial Officer (CFO).

While previous generation virtual assistants were little more than front-ends to a knowledge base, today's intelligent assistants are taking things to the next level with full conversational interactions - whether via chatbots in messaging threads or through virtual assistants embedded into the web journey.

A recent global survey revealed that 74% of all respondents had used voice search tools within the previous month, and estimated that voice search capabilities were already available on some 3.9 billion Apple, Android and Windows devices worldwide.

Reflecting on Verint’s recent European Partner Summit in Athens, it struck me that - despite our industry’s ongoing evolution towards AI, machine learning and automation – it’s still people that account for around 70% of contact centre expenditure.

News that Amazon has shut down its Mayday on-screen videochat support service for Fire tablets should come as no surprise, given how quickly video is now evolving to support the broader customer experience.